Mellungeons and Myth
Page 3 of 4
- Tuesday, October 01, 2002 -
Berlin makes the following observation about free blacks:
"By mid-century (1650) the Johnsons, the Paynes, and Graweeres were not alone among people of African descent who enjoyed freedom in the Chesapeake. Small communities of free blacks sprouted up all around the perimeter of the Chesapeake Bay, with the largest concentration on the eastern shore of Virginia and Maryland."
The social life of the early servants and slaves are discussed:
"Many blacks and whites appeared to enjoy one another''s company, perhaps because they shared so much. Behind closed doors, far from the eyes of suspicious slaveholders, black and white joined together to drink, gamble, frolic, and fight. Indeed, it was the violence that followed long bouts of ‘drinkinge and carrousinge'' that time and again revealed the extent of interracial conviviality..."
Berlin discusses the early mixing of races on the Chesapeake:
"Inevitably, conviviality led to other intimacies...Bastardy lists suggest that the largest source of mixed-race children in the seventeenth century Chesapeake was not the imposition of white planter men on black slave women but the relations of black slaves and white servants. Fragmentary evidence from various parts of Maryland and Virginia affirms that approximately one-quarter to one-third of the illegitimate children born to white women had fathers of African descent..."
He summarizes the close relationship between blacks and whites in the seventeenth century:
"Throughout the seventeenth century, black and white ran away together, joined in petty conspiracies, and upon occasion, stood shoulder-to-shoulder against the weighty champions of established authority. In 1676, when Nathaniel Bacon''s ‘Choice and Standing Army'' took to the field against forces commanded by Virginia''s royal governor, it drew on both white and black bondman in nearly equal proportions. Among the holdouts were a group of eighty black slaves and twenty white indentured servants, who bitterly condemned as a betrayal the surrender of Bacon''s officers."
The plantation regime, which Berlin discusses, began to put new strictures on the life of slaves and freed slaves. Berlin relates the following:
"In the 1660s the Johnson clan abandoned Virginia for Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. John Johnson and John Johnson, Jr., the son and grandson of Anthony Johnson, took refuge among the Nanticoke Indians and so-called Moors, among whom the Johnson name has loomed large into the twentieth century. Near one Nanticoke settlement in Delaware stands the small village of Angola, the name of John Johnson''s Virginia plantation and perhaps Anthony Johnson''s ancestral home. Similar ‘Indian'' tribes could be found scattered throughout the eastern half of the United States, categorized by twentieth -century ethnographers as ‘tri-racial isolates.''"
Berlin also discusses black people on the frontier:
"Others moved west to a different kind of autonomy. Scattered throughout the frontier areas of the eighteenth-century were handfuls of black people eager to escape the racially divided society of plantation America. In upcountry South Carolina, backcountry Virginia, and piedmont Georgia, white frontiersman with little sympathy for the nabobs of the tidewater sometimes sheltered such black men and women, employing them with no questions asked. People of African descent found refuge among the frontier banditti, whose interracial character – a ‘numerous Collection of outcast Mulattoes, Mustees, free Negroes, all Horse-Thieves,'' by one account – was the subject of constant denunciation by aspiring planters."
William Byrd, who was one of a party surveying the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina in 1728, confirms Berlin''s account of blacks on the frontier. He states the following in the History of the Dividing Line:
"We had encamped so early that we found time in the evening to walk near a half mile in the woods. There we came upon a family of mulattoes that called themselves free, though by the shyness of the master of the house, who took care to keep least in sight, their freedom seemed a little doubtful. It is certain many slaves shelter themselves in this part of the world, nor will any of their righteous neighbors discover them... Nor were these borderers content to shelter runaway slaves, but debtors and criminals have often met with like indulgence."
The "mulattoes," and others were welcome on a frontier where neighbor had to depend on neighbor. William Byrd and other planter elites had a less than flattering view of people on the frontier.
